Ok, This Scares Me

Buried in a British medical journal is an article entitled Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness. There is some blog coverage of this rather sweeping proposal, including from the nice people at Boing Boing. As nearly as I can tell, there is no American media coverage of this proposal.

Now, it is a laudable thing to say “Mental health is important, and should be checked right along with your blood pressure and cholesterol levels.” It is another thing to propose putting an unknown percentage of the American population on expensive, mind altering medication. The BMJ article points out that the Bush family has some financial interest in the companies that make these drugs.

The first problem, as I see it, is who exactly is going to pay for this? Just this week a bill that would have required health plans to cover mental health problems at the same levels as physical health problems was tabled without a vote in Congress. Add to that this week’s report that 82 million Americans lacked health insurance at some point in the last 2 years, some of them even among the nice, stable folk of the middle class.

The second problem — and pardon me while I adjust my aluminum foil hat — is that I am old enough to remember instances of psychiatric fraud resulting in young people having involuntary stays in mental hospitals at insurance company expense. (This is one reason why “insurance parity” is a hard pill for insurers to swallow.) What is to stop this program from being used to control the populace? There are already cases of parents in legal trouble for not giving their children ritalin. Will there be cases of people forced to take medication? Cases of people involuntarily committed — no pesky arrest warrants or fair-and-speedy trials necessary? It isn’t just something that happens in “fiction” novels.

Let’s hope this is another proposal from President Bush that lacks substance. Like the idea of going to Mars. Failing that, let’s hope he fails to budget nearly enough money for it, an “unfunded mandate” like No Child Left Behind.